Imaging workflow using facial and non-facial features

ABSTRACT

A method for determining an impact score for a digital image includes providing the digital image wherein the digital image includes faces; using a processor to determine an image feature for the faces; using the processor to compute an object impact score for the faces, wherein the object impact score is based at least upon one of the determined image features; weighting the object impact score for the faces based on one of the determined image features for a face; using the processor to compute an impact score for the digital image by combining the weighted object impact scores for the faces in the image; and storing the computed impact score in a processor accessible memory.

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION

This application is a continuation of and claims the benefit of U.S.Non-Provisional application Ser. No. 14/457,415, filed Aug. 12, 2014,entitled “Imaging Workflow Using Facial and Non-Facial Features,”, whichclaims benefit to U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/867,239, filedAug. 19, 2013, entitled “Imaging Workflow Using Facial and Non-FacialFeatures,” and U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/867,241, filed Aug.19, 2013, entitled “Imaging Workflow Using Facial and Non-FacialFeatures,” all of which are hereby incorporated in their entirety.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

This invention relates to digital image enhancement, and moreparticularly to methods and apparatuses for automatically determiningfitness scores of images for initial selection and more pleasingcompositions using facial and non-facial features embedded in digitalimages.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Consumer photography collections often contain assets captured by smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, and video recording devices, whereasset refers to any media asset, such as a digital still image, or adigital video file. These collections are stored on the capture devices,media from those capture devices, personal computers, personal computerstorage devices, cloud based storage, and online social websites. Thesecollections may span multiple family members, relatives, friends,neighbors, and anyone directly or indirectly connected via online socialnetworks.

The task of gathering, organizing, and assembling assets in preparationfor sharing with others can be quite difficult. For example, afterreturning from a family vacation, the family may decide to create aslideshow for display at an extended family reunion. The collection ofassets includes a mixture of still, video, and audio content that spansone or more cameras, each of the family smart phones, the family tablet,assets that were shared on social websites, stock assets from onlinewebsites of the locale, and may even include online assets of themselvesthey chose to purchase from a professional photographer or theme-basedphoto locations such as amusement park rides, famous places, or withanimals, bugs, and famous people.

Several product creation tools, such as HP's Photobook Lite for iPad oreven walk-up kiosks such as Eastman Kodak's Picture Kiosk allow aconsumer to import assets from multiple devices and input modalities tocreate an output product such as a collage, calendar, photobook, ordigital video. Once the product creation tool imports the collection ofassets from all the aforementioned storage locations, there are oftentoo many assets to use in the output product. By assigning a fitnessscore to each asset, the top scoring assets can be suggested for productcreation. Often there are several assets which are quite similar to oneanother. When assets are deemed to be similar enough, only the assetwith the highest score of the group of similar assets is used in theproduct. Further, there needs to be a way to determine which assets aresuperior to others such that they may be displayed more prominently(larger, more centrally located, or more duration).

U.S. Pat. No. 5,694,484 to Cottrell, et al., entitled “System and methodfor automatically processing image data to provide images of optimalperceptual quality,” describes a system involving several imageprocessing modules and a method for selecting an image processingparameter that will optimize image quality for a given digital image,using information about the image capture device and the intended imageoutput device. The method involves calculating an image quality metricthat can be expressed as a series of mathematical transformations. Theparameters used to control the image processing modules are varied, theimage quality metric is calculated for each permutation of the controlparameters, and the control parameters setting which yielded the bestvalue of the image quality metric are used to process the digital image.The method of Cottrell et al. is performed on an individual image basisand therefore does not include an assessment of the quality of thedigital image in either a relative or absolute basis relative to otherdigital images.

U.S. Pat. No. 6,671,405 to Savakis, etal., entitled “Method forautomatic assessment of emphasis and appeal in consumer images,”discloses an approach which computes a metric of “emphasis and appeal”of an image, without user intervention. A first metric is based upon anumber of factors, which can include: image semantic content (e.g.people, faces); objective features (e.g., colorfulness and sharpness);and main subject features (e.g., size of the main subject). A secondmetric compares the factors relative to other images in a collection.The factors are integrated using a trained reasoning engine. The methoddescribed in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2004/0075743 byChantani et al., entitled “System and method for digital imageselection,” is somewhat similar and discloses the sorting of imagesbased upon user-selected parameters of semantic content or objectivefeatures in the images. These approaches have the advantage of workingfrom the images themselves, but have the shortcoming of beingcomputationally intensive.

U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0263092 to Fedorovskaya, etal., entitled “Value index from incomplete data,” discloses an imageadministration system and method to compute value indices from differentcombinations of capture data, intrinsic image data, image usage data,and user reaction data. This approach has the advantage of usingcombined data to calculate a value metric, but has the shortcoming ofnot utilizing data relevant to aesthetic value.

U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2008/0285860 to Datta, et al.,entitled “Studying aesthetics in photographic images using acomputational approach,” discloses an approach to compute the aestheticquality of images in which a one-dimensional support vector machine isused to find features with a noticeable correlation with user aestheticratings. Then, automated classifiers are constructed utilizing a simplefeature selection heuristic. Numerical aesthetic ratings are inferred.

U.S. Pat. No. 6,816,847 to Toyama, entitled “Computerized aestheticjudgment of images,” discloses an approach to compute the aestheticquality of images through the use of a trained and automated classifierbased on features of the image.

Ke, et al., in their article entitled “The design of high-level featuresfor photo quality assessment” (Proc. Computer Vision and PatternRecognition, pp. 419-426, 2006 ) disclose an approach to classify imagesas either “high quality professional photos” or “consumer snapshots.” Anumber of features are proposed: spatial distribution of edges, colordistribution, hue count, blur, contrast, and brightness. This approachis useful, but also limited by the metric being binary.

U.S. Pat. No. 8,311,364 to Cerosaletti, et al., entitled “Estimatingaesthetic quality of digital images,” discloses an approach to computethe aesthetic quality of images through the use of a trained andautomated classifier based on features of the image.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

According to the present invention, a method for determining an impactscore for a digital image comprises providing the digital image whereinthe digital image includes one or more faces; using a processor todetermine at least one image feature for each of the one or more faces;using the processor to compute an object impact score for each of theone or more faces, wherein the object impact score is based at leastupon one of the determined image features; weighting the object impactscore for each of the one or more faces based on at least one of thedetermined image features for the face; using the processor to computean impact score for the digital image by combining the weighted objectimpact scores for the one or more faces in the image; and storing thecomputed impact score in a processor accessible memory. The methodfurther includes using the processor to determine a size and a locationfor each of the one or more faces; and weighting the object impact scorefor each of the one or more faces based on the location and the size ofthe face in the image. The image features include size, location,brightness, contrast, eye blink, facial expression, sharpness, noise,and colorfulness.

According to the present invention, a method for adjusting an impactscore for an appearance of a person in a digital image based on aprofile for the person comprises providing the digital image includingthe person; providing a parameter profile for the person, the parameterprofile including weighting scores for a plurality of features for theperson; using a processor to detel mine at least one image feature forthe person; using the processor to compute an object impact score forthe person based at least upon one of the determined image features;weighting the object impact score for the person using the parameterprofile; and storing the object impact score in a processor accessiblememory. The method further includes using the processor to adjust theparameter profile for the person based on the determined image featuresfor the person in the digital image. The image features include size,location, brightness, contrast, eye blink, facial expression, sharpness,noise, and colorfulness. The parameter profile includes weighting scoresfor individual features and includes weighting scores for demographicfeatures.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

Preferred embodiments of the present invention will be more readilyunderstood from the detailed description of exemplary embodimentspresented below considered in conjunction with the attached drawings, ofwhich:

FIG. 1 illustrates components of an apparatus and system for modifying adigital image according to an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 2 illustrates a computer system embodiment for modifying a digitalimage according to an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 3A is a block diagram that shows the relationship between X objectsin an asset according to an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 3B is a block diagram that combines multiple assets from a singleevent into an overall event set of features and parameters according toan embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 3C is a block diagram that extends the notion of feature andquality parameters across a user collection according to an embodimentof the present invention.

FIG. 4 is a graph that shows a sample mapping f( ), from object areanormalized by total asset area, to a metric called size according to anembodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 5 shows a sample centrality importance map according to anembodiment of the present invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

Digital capture devices have made it possible for consumers to captureand save vast numbers of media assets. The number of media assets can beoverwhelming, making it difficult for consumers to find appropriateassets and determine which are best to share with their family orfriends. Embodiments of the present invention provide ways toefficiently compute a hierarchical metric, referred to herein as an“asset quality structure,” which provides a measure of the quality ofindividual instances of subject matter in a media asset as well as anoverall measure of quality for each asset, as well as a measure ofquality for a collection of assets. The asset quality structure is anautomatically computed set of metrics for assessing the expected valueof an object in an asset, the asset itself, or a collection of assetsbased upon quality, usefulness, or other perceived value by a user. Theasset quality structure is determined by extracting features related topeople, which directly augment estimates of exposure, tonescale, color,structure, and composition, which determine the quality of measures.

The phrase “asset,” as used herein, refers to any media asset, such as adigital still image, a digital video file, or a frame extracted from adigital video file. Further, it should be noted that, unless otherwiseexplicitly noted or required by context, the word “or” is used in thisdisclosure in a non-exclusive sense.

In the following description, some embodiments of the present inventionwill be described in terms that would ordinarily be implemented assoftware programs. Those skilled in the art will readily recognize thatthe equivalent of such software may also be constructed in hardware.Because image manipulation algorithms and systems are well known, thepresent description will be directed in particular to algorithms andsystems forming part of, or cooperating more directly with, the methodin accordance with the present invention. Other aspects of suchalgorithms and systems, and hardware and/or software for producing andotherwise processing the image signals involved therewith, notspecifically shown or described herein may be selected from suchsystems, algorithms, components, and elements known in the art. Giventhe system as described according to the invention in the following,software not specifically shown, suggested, or described herein that isuseful for implementation of the invention is conventional and withinthe ordinary skill in such arts.

FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a digital camera phone 10 based imagingsystem that can be used to implement the present invention. The digitalcamera phone 10 is one type of digital camera. The present invention canalso be implemented for use with any other type of digital imagingdevice, such as other types of digital still camera or digital videocameras, or with any system that receives digital images.

Preferably, the digital camera phone 10 is a portable battery operateddevice, small enough to be easily handheld by a user when capturing andreviewing images. The digital camera phone 10 produces digital imagesthat are stored using the image/data memory 20, which can be, forexample, internal Flash EPROM memory, or a removable memory card. Othertypes of digital image storage media, such as magnetic hard drives,magnetic tape, or optical disks, can alternatively be used to providethe image/data memory 20.

The digital camera phone 10 includes a lens 30 that focuses light from ascene (not shown) onto an image sensor array 40 of a CMOS image sensor50. The image sensor array 40 can provide color image information usingthe well-known Bayer color filter pattern. The image sensor array 40 iscontrolled by timing generator 60, which also controls a flash 70 inorder to illuminate the scene when the ambient illumination is low. Theimage sensor array 40 can have, for example, 1280 columns×960 rows ofpixels.

In some embodiments, the digital camera phone 10 can also capture andstore video clips. Often the process of forming the video clips includessumming multiple pixels of the image sensor array 40 together (e.g.summing pixels of the same color within each 4 column×4 row area of theimage sensor array 40 ) to create a lower resolution video image frame.The video image frames are then read from the image sensor array 40 atregular intervals, for example using a 24 frame per second readout rate.

The analog output signals from the image sensor array 40 are amplifiedand converted to digital data by the analog-to-digital (A/D) converter80 on the CMOS sensor 50. The digital data is stored in a DRAM buffermemory 90 and subsequently processed by a digital processor 100controlled by the firmware stored in firmware memory 110, which can beflash EPROM memory. The digital processor 100 includes a real-time clock120, which keeps the date and time even when the digital camera phone 10and digital processor 100 are in their low power state.

The processed digital image files are stored in the image/data memory20. The image/data memory 20 can also be used to store asset qualitystructure determined using the method of the present invention. Theimage/data memory 20 can also store other types of data, such asphotographer id, image of the photographer, rankings of photographers,and phone numbers.

In the still image mode, the digital processor 100 performs colorinterpolation followed by color and tone correction, in order to producerendered image data, typically in the well-known sRGB color space. Thedigital processor 100 can also provide various image sizes selected bythe user. The rendered sRGB image data is then JPEG compressed andstored as a JPEG image file in the image/data memory 20. The JPEG imagefile will typically use the well-known EXIF (EXchangable Image FileFormat) image format. This format includes an EXIF application segmentthat stores particular image metadata using various TIFF tags. SeparateTIFF tags can be used, for example, to store the date and time thepicture was captured, the lens F/# and other camera settings, and tostore image captions. In particular, the ImageDescription tag can beused to store labels. The real-time clock 120 provides a capturedate/time value, which is stored as date/time metadata in each Exifimage file.

The location determiner 130 provides the geographic location associatedwith an image capture. The location determiner 130 may use any of anumber of methods for determining the location of the image. Forexample, the geographic location may be determined from the location ofnearby cell phone towers or by receiving communications from thewell-known Global Positioning Satellites (GPS). The location ispreferably stored in units of latitude and longitude. Note that thelocation determiner 130 may determine the geographic location at a timeslightly different than the image capture time. In that case, thelocation determiner 130 can use a geographic location from the nearesttime as the geographic location associated with the image.Alternatively, the location determiner 130 can estimate the geographiclocation at the time of image capture using geographic locationsdetermined at times before or after the image capture time. This may benecessitated because it is not always possible for the locationdeterminer 130 to determine a geographic location. For example, the GPSreceivers often fail to detect signal when indoors. In that case, thelast successful geographic location (i.e. prior to entering thebuilding) can be used by the location determiner 130 to estimate thegeographic location associated with a particular image capture.Alternatively, the geographic location can be estimated by interpolatingbetween geographic locations determined at times before and after theimage capture time.

The digital processor 100 can also create a low-resolution “thumbnail”size image, as described in commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 5,164,831,entitled “Electronic Still Camera Providing Multi-Format Storage of Fulland Reduced Resolution Images” to Kuchta, et al., the disclosure ofwhich is herein incorporated by reference. The thumbnail image can bestored in Random Access Memory (RAM) 140 and supplied to a color display150, which can be, for example, an active matrix LCD or organic lightemitting diode (OLED). After images are captured, they can be quicklyreviewed on the color display 150 by using the thumbnail image data.

The graphical user interface displayed on the color display 150 iscontrolled by user controls 160. The user controls 160 can includededicated push buttons (e.g. a telephone keypad) to dial a phone number,a control to set the mode (e.g. “phone” mode, “camera” mode), a joystickcontroller that includes 4-way control (up, down, left, right) and apush-button center “OK” switch, or the like.

An audio codec 170 connected to the digital processor 100 receives anaudio signal from a microphone 180 and provides an audio signal to aspeaker 190. These components can be used both for telephoneconversations and to record and playback an audio track, along with avideo sequence or still image. The speaker 190 can also be used toinform the user of an incoming phone call. This can be done using astandard ring tone stored in firmware memory 110, or by using a customring-tone downloaded from a mobile phone network 200 and stored in theimage/data memory 20. In addition, a vibration device (not shown) can beused to provide a silent (e.g. non audible) notification of an incomingphone call.

A dock interface 210 can be used to connect the digital camera phone 10to a dock/charger 220, which is in turn connected to a general purposecomputer 230. The dock interface 210 may conform to, for example, thewell-known USB interface specification. Alternatively, the interfacebetween the digital camera phone 10 and the general purpose computer 230can be a wireless interface, such as the well-known Bluetooth wirelessinterface or the well-known 802.11b wireless interface. The dockinterface 210 can be used to download images from the image/data memory20 to the general purpose computer 230. The dock interface 210 can alsobe used to transfer information (e.g., calendar data) from the generalpurpose computer 230 to the image/data memory in the digital cameraphone 10. The dock/charger 220 can also be used to recharge thebatteries (not shown) in the digital camera phone 10.

It should also be noted that the present invention can be implemented ina combination of software and hardware and is not limited to devicesthat are physically connected or located within the same physicallocation. The digital processor 100 is coupled to a wireless modem 240,which enables the digital camera phone 10 to transmit and receiveinformation via an RF channel 250. The wireless modem 240 communicatesover a radio frequency (e.g. wireless) link with the mobile phonenetwork 200, such as a 3GSM network. The mobile phone network 200 cancommunicate with a photo service provider 260, which can store digitalimages uploaded from the digital camera phone 10. These images can beaccessed via the Internet 270 by other devices, including the generalpurpose computer 230. The mobile phone network 200 also connects to astandard telephone network (not shown) in order to provide normaltelephone service.

The invention is inclusive of combinations of embodiments describedherein. References to “a particular embodiment” and the like refer tofeatures that are present in at least one embodiment of the invention.Separate references to “an embodiment” or “particular embodiments” orthe like do not necessarily refer to the same embodiments; however, suchembodiments are not mutually exclusive, unless so indicated or as arereadily apparent to one of skill in the art. The use of singular and/orplural in referring to the “method” or “methods” and the like is notlimiting.

Referring now to FIG. 2, a method is described for determining qualityparameters 280 for a media asset 200 according to an embodiment of thepresent invention. According to this embodiment, a collection of mediaassets 200 is provided and quality parameters 280 are determined foreach one. A variety of different object detectors can be computedsuccessfully with respect to the assets 200 in accordance with thepresent invention. For example, well known object detectors include facedetection, person detection, and main subject detection, but similartechniques can be used to find almost any type of object.

In one embodiment, the object detector 210 is utilized to find humanfaces, and the detected faces form objects 212, 222 in asset 200, whereX is the number of faces found. Preferably, these facial objects 212,222 are found using a face detection algorithm. Methods for detectinghuman faces are well known in the art of digital image processing. Forexample, a face detection method for finding human faces in images isdescribed in the article “Robust real-time face detection” by Viola, etal. (Int. Journal of Computer Vision, Vol. 57, pp. 137-154, 2004). Thismethod utilizes an “integral image” representation that consists of theimmediate horizontal and vertical sums of pixels above a specific pixellocation. Then, the full integral image can be computed as a successivesummation over any number of array references. These rectangularfeatures are input to a classifier built using the AdaBoost learningalgorithm to select a small number of critical features. Finally, theclassifiers are combined in a “cascade” so that the image backgroundregions are discarded so that algorithms can operate only on face-likeregions.

An object feature detector 214 is used to extract object features 216,226 from the detected objects 212, 222. If the objects are faces, thefacial features (e.g. eyes, nose, mouth, etc.) are localized using wellknown methods such as described by Yuille et al. in, “Feature extractionfrom faces using deformable templates” (Int. Journal of Computer Vision,Vol. 8, pp. 99-111, 1992). This approach uses a method of using energyminimization with template matching for locating the mouth, eye andiris/sclera boundary. Facial features can also be found using activeappearance models as described by Cootes, et al. in the article“Constrained active appearance models” (8th International Conference onComputer Vision, Vol. 1, pp. 748-754, 2001).

In one aspect of the present invention, the method of locating facialfeature points is based on an Active Shape Model (ASM) of human facesdescribed by Bolin and Chen in the article “An Automatic facial featurefinding system for portrait images” (Proceedings of IS&T PICSConference, 2002) is used.

In some embodiments, a confidence score is associated with each locatedfacial object, measuring the likelihood that the identified region infact corresponds to a face.

It is well-known that a standard measure of the face size is thedistance between the eyes which is a common output of most facedetectors. The entire face can also be localized by using the x, ylocation of the eyes. Other common outputs of typical face detectors arethe x, y image coordinates for vertices of a rectangular bounding boxthat encompasses the detected face. The face location can alternately beestimated by the centroid of the facial feature points and the size canbe estimated by the area of the bounding box.

Additional analysis is performed on the pixel values enclosed by thefacial bounding box to determine face contrast, brightness, and imagestructure. The contrast of the face is computed by first converting theimage into a visual domain such as CIELAB (a well-known color spacesdefined by the International Commission on Illumination, abbreviated asCIE). This color space consists of a lightness channel (L*) and twochroma channels, a* and b*. Brightness and contrast computations areperformed on the lightness channel of the image contained by the facialbounding box area. The face area is normalized to a canonicalrepresentation before processing. Eye and mouth corner points extractedfrom the face of interest enable precise facial localization. In apreferred embodiment, these eye and mouth corner points are projectionmapped to a canonical reference face of 60×51 pixels, with left eyecoordinates of {(12,21), (20,21)}, right eye coordinates of {(34,21)(42,21)}, and mouth coordinates of {(17,45), (36,45)}. Because each facehas unique eye and mouth corner points, the 3×3 projection matrix issolved on an image by image basis.

Both the image pixels and ASM facial feature points are passed throughthis 3×3 projection matrix. After warping, facial regions can beprocessed independently using the ASM localized facial feature points.Empirical studies have shown that when the face exhibits yaw, the sideof the face facing the camera is a better predictor for image qualityparameters such as brightness, contrast, sharpness, and noise. Forexample, the side of the face away from the camera is not as well lit,and may unfairly characterize the asset as under exposed, low contrast,low color, and of higher noise. In the warped canonical state, simplemasks can extract pixels from any location of the face.

To determine if one side of the face is preferable to the other, theareas of the left and right cheeks are computed using the unwarped ASMfacial feature points. If the area of the two is within α%, the face isfrontal and both cheeks are used. In a preferred embodiment, α=15. Ifthe area of the left cheek is greater than α% of the right check, theperson's yaw is directing to the right, and the left cheek is used forfacial analysis.

A simple representation of the brightness of the face is computed usingthe mean of the cheek lightness values (L*). The noise of the face iscomputed using the standard deviation of the cheek lightness values(L*). The contrast of the image is computed by first computing thehistogram of the entire face region, normalizing the area to 1.0,subtracting the mean code value, then determining the codevalue span ofmidtone pixels, where the codevalue span of midtone pixels are theminCodevalue subtracted from the maxCodevalue, where maxCodevalue is thecodevalue that contains x% of all pixels, and minCodevalue is thecodevalue that contains y% of all pixels. In a preferred embodiment,x=95% and y=5%. Alternatively, other means can be used to computecontrast and brightness for complex images such as those described byPeli in “Contrast in Complex Images” (JOSA, Vol A 7, Iss. 10, 1990, pp.2032-2040).

The size of the face can be computed via the eye corner points orintraocular distance. If the eye corner points are used and theEuclidean distance between the left and right eye width is within β%,the face is frontal and both cheeks are used. In a preferred embodiment,β=10. If the length of the left eye is greater than β% of the right eye,the person's yaw is directing to the right, and the left eye is morestable and used for facial size analysis. For natural scenes, it hasbeen determined that the frontal facing eye width is more predictive offacial size than the backward facing eye. The size of the face iscomputed as 2×frontal eye width.

If the eye centroids are used, the intraocular distance between eyes isused after yaw correction. As the human face turns side to side, the 2Dprojection of intraocular distance varies as a function of yaw. This hasthe unfortunate side effect of decreasing the facial size from what itactually is, had it been frontal facing. Intraocular distance isnormalized by yaw using:

$\begin{matrix}{\Delta^{\prime} = {\Delta {\sum\limits_{j = 0}^{4}\; {c_{j}{yaw}^{j}}}}} & (1)\end{matrix}$

where Δ is the inter-ocular distance in the image, and Δ′ is the boostedinter-ocular distance as if the subject were facing forward. Theparameter c was solved by Ptucha et al. in “Facial Pose Tracking forInteractive Display” (WNYIPW, 2009) as [1.0, 0.0, 0.00014943, 0.0,0.00000003].

The static and transient natures of the human face are also importantfacial features. The static features include aspects that typically donot change during a session such as gender, race, age, facial hair,glasses, and hat. The transient features include pose, eye blink,expression, mouth open, tongue out, and occlusions such as hand or cupin front of the face. The canonical face pixels and facial featurepoints are passed into machine learning techniques to make estimates ofeach. Murphy-Churtorian et al. in “Head Pose Estimation in ComputerVision”, Pattern and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 31, 2009 describes howto estimate pose. Ptucha et al. in “Manifold Based Sparse Representationfor Facial Understanding in Natural Images”, Image and Visual Computing,Vol. 31, 2013 describes how to estimate facial expression, gender, race,glasses, facial hair, and how do detect facial occlusions. Identicaltechniques are used for other facial aspects such as facial identity,eye blink, mouth open, etc.

When the detected overall object features 216, 226 are faces, theseconstituent features include the size and location of the face; thepitch, roll, and yaw of the face; the contrast, brightness, colorbalance, and noise of the face; the gender, race, hair style andneatness appearance, and identity of the face; the facial expression,eye blink, eye gaze, red eye, mouth open, teeth detection, tonguedetection, glasses detection, hat detection, and occlusion detection ofthe face. More generally, when the detected object features are people,the constituent features may include clothing, including the color ofthe clothing, the style such as formal wear versus casual wear, andcondition including state of wrinkleness, wear, or disarray. Inaddition, the detected features may include other environmental factorsuch as the surrounding scene and/or a characterization of the scene,including outdoor urban, outdoor park, indoor formal setting or indoorcasual setting.

A main subject detection algorithm such as that disclosed in U.S. Pat.No. 6,282,317 to Luo et al. entitled “Method for automatic determinationof main subjects in consumer images” can also be used in place of theobject detector 210 to compute the location, size, contrast, brightness,color balance, and noise of any main subject. This method extractsregions of arbitrary shape and size defined by actual objects. It thengroups the regions into larger segments corresponding to physicallycoherent objects, extracts structural and semantic saliency features,and integrates saliency features using a probabilistic reasoning engineinto an estimate of a belief that each region is the main subject. Themain subject belief map consists of a probability value P(x, y) as afunction of the x, y image coordinates, where the estimate of belief isexpressed as a probability value and is assigned to a grayscale value.

The location of the entire main subject is estimated by the centroid ofthe main subject weighted by the probability. The centroid (C_(x),C_(y)) of the main subject is computed as:

$\begin{matrix}{\begin{bmatrix}C_{x} \\C_{y}\end{bmatrix} = \begin{bmatrix}\frac{\sum_{n}{x_{n}\left( {P\left( {x_{n},y_{n}} \right)} \right)}}{N} \\\frac{\sum_{n}{y_{n}\left( {P\left( {x_{n},y_{n}} \right)} \right)}}{N}\end{bmatrix}} & (2)\end{matrix}$

where x_(n) and y_(n) are the x and y image coordinates for the n^(th)image pixel, and N is the total number of image pixels.

The size of the probable main subject is computed by counting the numberof pixels for which P(x, y)>k, for some constant k. In one preferredembodiment, k=0.50. In other embodiments, the size of the probable mainsubject may be computed by computing the number of pixels for whichP(x,y) is greater than some value f(x,y), where the threshold isdependent upon the values of the neighboring pixels. The size of themain subject should be measured as a fraction of the entire image toachieve invariance to scaling:

$\begin{matrix}{{{size}\mspace{14mu} {of}\mspace{14mu} {main}\mspace{14mu} {subject}} = \frac{{number}\mspace{14mu} {of}\mspace{14mu} {main}\mspace{14mu} {subject}\mspace{14mu} {pixels}}{{number}\mspace{14mu} {of}\mspace{11mu} {total}\mspace{14mu} {image}\mspace{14mu} {pixels}}} & (3)\end{matrix}$

The brightness of the probable main subject is computed by computing themean of the pixels for which P(x,y)>0.50. The color balance of theprobable main subject is computed by computing the hue and saturation ofthe pixels for which P(x, y)>0.50. The noise of the probable mainsubject is computed by computing the standard deviation of the pixelsfor which P(x, y)>0.50. The contrast of the probable main subject iscomputed by computing the max-min pixel code value range of the pixelsfor which P(x, y)>0.50 that make up the inner 90% of the cumulativehistogram. Again, other constant or computed values may be used as thethresholds, instead of 0.50 as used in the exemplary preferredembodiment.

It should be obvious that the object detector 210 can be expanded toinclude any particular object of interest. For example, instead of humanfaces, we can extract regions based upon human body or human torso asdescribed in Ramanan, D., Forsyth, D. A. “Finding and Tracking PeopleFrom the Bottom Up,” CVPR 2003, which is incorporated herein byreference in its entirety. Similarly, using identical techniques used totrain human face detectors as described by Burghardt, T. Calle, J.,“Analysing Animal Behavior in Wildlife Videos Using Face Detection andTracking,” Vision, Image and Signal Processing, 2006, which isincorporated herein by reference in its entirety, we can train to findanimals of any sort, including pet dogs, cats, or even fish; or train onbacterium, viruses, or internal organs; or trained to find cars,military vehicles, or parts off an assembly line. Further, with theintroduction of depth cameras such as Microsoft's Kinect and silhouetteextraction techniques such as described in Shotton, Jamie et. Al.“Real-Time Human Pose Recognition in Parts from Single Depth Images,”CVPR 2011, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, itis common to find and track humans in real-time and such humans can besegmented by depth, pose, or gesture.

An asset feature detector 240 is used to detect asset features 242 inasset 200. These features include brightness, colorfulness, number ofhues, color distribution, sharpness, noise, and contrast. Some of thesefeatures are also detected as object features 220, and supplement theasset feature detector 240. Further, the size, location, and number ofobject features 216, 226 serve as useful inputs to the asset featuredetector 240 in determining final asset features 242.

The asset feature detector 240 can extract a variety of different colorfeatures such as colorfulness, number of hues, and color distributionare known to those skilled in the art and can be computed for asset 200in accordance with the present invention. A method to compute acolorfulness value for media asset 200 is described by U.S. Pat. No.6,671,405 to Savakis et al., which is incorporated herein by reference.In this method, image pixel values of the asset 200 are converted to aluminance-chrominance color space and the chrominance plane is quantizedinto twelve chromaticity plane wedges or bins. Image pixels areassociated with a particular bin based on the value of the pixel'schrominance component. For those active bins in which the number of highsaturation pixels has exceeded a specified threshold, colorfulness C iscomputed as:

$\begin{matrix}{C = \frac{\min \left\{ {{{Number}\mspace{14mu} {of}\mspace{14mu} {active}\mspace{14mu} {bins}},1.0} \right\}}{10}} & (4)\end{matrix}$

A method for calculating the number of hues that can be used in anembodiment of the present invention is described by Ke, et al. in thearticle “The design of high-level features for photo quality assessment”(Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 419-426, 2006). In thismethod, the number of hues is calculated by first converting image pixelvalues of the asset 200 to the HSV color space and then, computing a20-bin histogram using the H values which have saturation greater than0.2 and brightness in the range of 0.15 to 0.95. The number of hues in agrayscale image is 1.

A method for calculating a color distribution that can be used in anembodiment of the present invention is described in the aforementionedarticle “The design of high-level features for photo qualityassessment,” by Ke, et al. In this method, the image is composed of red,green, and blue channels. The red, green, and blue channels arequantized into 16 values. A histogram is created that is composed of4096=16³ bins to give the count of each quantized color present in theimage. The histogram should be normalized to unit length to allow forabsolute comparisons between media assets. A well-known L₁ statisticalmetric can be used to calculate the distance between histograms.Alternately, the histogram values can be used directly as colorfeatures.

Similarly, a structure feature detector within the asset featuredetector 240 is used to detect structure features as part of the assetfeatures 242 in the asset 200. A variety of different structure featuressuch as sharpness, and spatial distribution of edges are known to thoseskilled in the art and can be computed for assets 200 in accordance withthe present invention. One method of calculating a spatial distributionof edges is described in the aforementioned article “The design ofhigh-level features for photo quality assessment,” by Ke, et al. In thismethod, an edge spatial distribution feature extractor is implemented. A3×3 Laplacian filter with α=0.2 is applied separately to each of thered, green, and blue channels. Then, the mean is taken across the threechannels. The Laplacian image is resized to 100×100 pixels and the imagesum is normalized to 1 to allow for absolute comparison between imagesand within groups of media asset content categories such as images withpeople and images without people. The L₁ statistical metric can be usedto calculate the distance between pairs of Laplacian images.Alternatively, the Laplacian image can be used to compute an imagestructure feature by measuring the amount of area that the edges occupyby computing the area of a bounding box that encloses a certainpercentage (e.g., the top 96.04%) of the edge energy.

A method of calculating sharpness features by using a sharpness detectoras described in detail by U.S. Pat. No. 6,535,636 to Savakis et al.,which is incorporated herein by reference, is used. Sharpness of anasset 200 is found through converting the image to grayscale, detectingimage edges, creating an edge histogram, finding the strongest-edgeregions, computing statistics of strongest-edges, and using the averageof the strongest edges as an estimate of sharpness.

A capture information extractor 250 is utilized to identify capturefeatures 252 for an asset 200. The capture information extractor 250determines the capture features 252 related to the capture of the asset200, and outputs the resulting capture features 252. The capturefeatures 252 can include, for example, the date and time the asset 200was captured, the focal length, the subject distance, the magnification,whether the flash was fired, whether the self-timer was activated,global positioning satellite (GPS) coordinates, and the imageresolution. Those skilled in the art will recognize a variety ofdifferent possible methods for the capture information extractor 250 todetermine capture features 252. Often times, capture features 252 areembedded in the file header of the asset 200. For example, EXIF metadatacan be used by the asset capture device to store information associatedwith the capture of the asset 200. For example, the “Date/Time” metadataentry is associated with the date and time the asset 200 is captured.The capture information extractor 250 uses the most appropriate methodfor extracting the capture features 252 for the assets 200. The capturefeature of image resolution (i.e., the number of rows and columns ofimage pixels) is used as capture features 252 in a preferred embodimentof the present invention.

A scene information extractor is used to identify scene features for anasset 200. Scene classifiers identify or classify an image asrepresenting one or more scene types such as indoor or outdoor, urban,restaurant, park or yard. Material and texture classifiers identify orclassify an image as containing one or more materials or texture types,such as rock, sand, grass, or blue sky. Object classifiers identify orclassify an image as containing one or more objects, such as car, cat,or bicycle. Operation of such classifiers are described in theliterature, including U.S. Pat. No. 6,282,317 entitled “Method forautomatic determination of main subjects in photographic images”; U.S.Pat. No. 6,697,502 entitled “Image processing method for detecting humanfigures in a digital image assets”; U.S. Pat. No. 6,504,951 entitled“Method for Detecting Sky in Images”; U.S. Patent ApplicationPublication 2005/0105776 entitled “Method for Semantic SceneClassification Using Camera Metadata and Content-based Cues”; U.S.Patent Application Publication 2005/0105775 entitled “Method of UsingTemporal Context for Image Classification”; and U.S. Patent ApplicationPublication 2004/003746 entitled “Method for Detecting Objects inDigital image assets.” Research in image understanding algorithmscontinues to result in new and improved scene, material activity andobject classifiers and recognizers, which can easily be incorporatedinto the invention. Recent work enables a wide range of scene types tobe classified, given sufficient positive and negative trainingexemplars.

A social information extractor 260 is utilized to identify socialfeatures 262 for an asset 200. The social information extractor 260determines the social features 262 related to the capture of the asset200, and outputs the resulting social features 262. The social features262 can include, for example, the number of likes for the asset 200,comments, tags, viewings, downloads, links to other photo collections,upload date, was image used as a profile pictures, similarity to otherassets in other photo collections, and statistics on the owners of thecomments, tags, likes, etc. Similarly, the temporal history of asset,including the timestamps of each action, owner of each action, ownerdemographics of each action, and backward and forward pedigree of eachaction can be quite useful. The backward pedigree includes a trail ofasset history—i.e.: Asset was the result of a reply to a reply to a blogpost. The forward pedigree includes a forward looking trail—i.e.: theposting of this asset cause follow-on posts by others.

A quality computer 270 is used to compute an aesthetic quality parameter280 responsive to the object features 220, asset features 242, capturefeatures 252, scene features, and social features 262. Although certainembodiments have been thus described herein, the invention is notexclusive of other different forms of object features 220, assetfeatures 242, capture features 252, scene features and social features262 that can be computed for an asset 200. Those skilled in the art willrecognize a variety of different features that make asset 200 estimatesof color, tone, structure, and composition can be input to the qualitycomputer 270 to compute quality parameters 280. Further, it is notnecessary for the quality computer 270 to utilize all of these differentfeature types in the computation of the quality parameter 280. Forexample, in one embodiment of the present invention, only the objectfeatures 220 are used in the computation of the quality parameter 280.

The quality parameters 280 are a single one-dimensional value, sincethis allows simpler comparisons between media assets. In anotherpreferred embodiment of the present invention, the quality parameters280 contain the individual components that can optionally result in aone-dimensional value. For example, a user may only be concerned withasset colorfulness. In another preferred embodiment, the qualityparameters form a vector. For example, if objects whose quality is beingassessed or scored are a person, then the quality parameters may form avector of values, or even a multidimensional vector of values, includingdisparate types of values such as the facial features, the clothingfeatures, and the scene features. Two vector-based quality parametersmay be compared, for example, by comparing the Euclidean distances ofthe two parameters relative to some zero-point origin. The vectors maybe further weighted according to either a static or dynamic weighting.Confidence values may be associated with the individual components; theconfidence values may then be incorporated into the comparison betweentwo quality parameters. The resulting quality parameters 280 can beassociated with the assets 200 by use of a database or can be stored asmetadata in the media asset digital file.

A simplistic approach that the quality computer 270 can use to determinethe quality parameter 280 is to simply sum up equally valued or weightedinputs. If the inputs are weighted, then the weighting may be determinedbased upon the expected or perceived importance of the inputs. Forexample, if the inputs correspond to different face objects each with anassociated confidence score, the weight may be a function of theconfidence score, such that face objects with higher confidence scoresare weighted more heavily. However, preferably more sophisticatedmethods are used to determine the quality parameter 280. In a particularembodiment, the quality computer 270 is a reasoning engine that has beentrained to generate quality parameters 280 through a classificationprocess. In the reasoning engine, different input values, identified byrespective inputs, can compete or reinforce each other according toknowledge derived from the results of the true quality values from humanobservers-evaluations of real images. In this case, confidence scoresmay simply serve as an additional set of inputs. Competition andreinforcement are resolved by the inference network of the reasoningengine. A currently preferred reasoning engine is a Bayes net.

The true quality parameter values are gathered from humanobservers-evaluations of real images. By using empirical data collectionmethods, a psychometric experiment can be conducted in which humanobservers evaluate a variety of different images. For example, imagescan be rated using a 0 to 100-point scale bi-anchored with “lowestimaginable” and “highest imaginable” for pleasing attributes. Theaforementioned features can then be computed for all of these images.The image ratings are considered true quality parameters and can then beprovided as a training data set to the reasoning engine. The imageratings can also be clustered by the patterns of human observerresponses utilizing techniques such as k-means clustering as describedby Duda et al. in “Pattern Classification” (John Wiley and Sons, NewYork, 2001). These clusters can also be provided as a training data setto the reasoning engine. Quality parameters specific to a givenindividual or population may also be inferred from preexistingcollections of images wherein data is or may be associated with eachimage. For example, social media such as Facebook provides a vastcollection of imagery from which image ratings may be inferred. First,one may assume that imagery posted on social media will generallyportray individuals wherein their appearances show more pleasingattributes. Second, auxiliary data such as comments or the number oflikes associated with an image may be used to further refine thetypically noisy data typically present in such systems. For example, itmay be assumed that comments of the form “you lookstunning/beautiful/gorgeous” typically are associated with pictureswherein the portrayed person does in fact have a more pleasingappearance. Commonly used natural language processing techniques andsemantic dictionaries such as WordNet may be further employed tointerpret the emotive meaning of comments. Such mechanisms result in aset of exemplars or training data, which may need to be complementedwith other sources of data to provide a more balanced dataset.

One reasoning engine, a Bayes net, is a directed acyclic graph thatrepresents causality relationships between various entities in thegraph, where the direction of links represents causality relationshipsbetween various entities in the graph. (For a discussion of Bayes netssee, for example. “Causality: models, reasoning, and inference” by J.Pearl (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000). Evaluation is basedon knowledge of the joint Probability Distribution Function (PDF) amongvarious entities.

Other reasoning engines may be employed in place of the Bayes net. Forexample, in the aforementioned text, “Pattern Classification” by Duda etal., a variety of different classifiers are described that can be usedto solve pattern recognition problems, where having the right set offeatures is normally the most important consideration. Such classifiersinclude support vector machines (SVM), AdaBoost, linear discriminantanalysis methods, artificial neural networks, non-parametric methods,and tree-structured classifiers. It will be obvious to anyone ofordinary skill in such methods that any of these classifiers can beadopted as the reasoning engine for practice of the present invention.The quality computer 270 will have a plethora of input features. To makethe computational engine more tractable, and to make the input featuresmore discriminant, dimensionality reduction techniques can be utilized.Further, a dictionary of features can be used to improve the accuracy ofthe quality computer 270. Ptucha et al. in “Manifold Based SparseRepresentation for Facial Understanding in Natural Images”, Image andVisual Computing, Vol. 31, 2013 describes how to use both dimensionalityreduction and sparse representation for facial features. Identicaltechniques can be used for any feature to quality parameter mappingproblem.

The generation of a low dimensional space can also enable the programmerto determine the vector of importance for each dimension. For example,using such techniques it is possible to create a single dimensioncorresponding to the quality of pose, another for smile, another forblink, another for size, etc.

Referring to FIG. 3A, each object 310, 320 in an asset 300 has its ownfeatures and quality parameters 315, 325. When objects are human faces,these parameters include facial size, expression, eye blink, pose,brightness, identity, etc. When subjects are human bodies, qualityparameters include size, pose, gesture, clothing type and appearance,brightness, identity, scene type, etc; when subjects are determined by amain subject detector, these parameters include size, colorfulness,location, brightness, etc. When the object detector 210 is trained torecognize other objects, such as dogs or cars, the subject features aremodified to the subject in question, for example dogs would have size,pose, gesture, hair color, etc; cars would have size, pose, color,style, etc.

By including both features and quality parameters with each object, itis possible to select objects with certain features (e.g., long hair,glasses, male) or with a threshold of acceptable quality levels (e.g.,overall quality parameter >0.75). In FIG. 3A, there are X objects in theimage, where each object x, x=1 . . . X, has its own features andquality parameters.

The asset 300 also has its own features and resulting quality parameters305. In a simplistic fashion, the object features can be the mean of allX features. Improved results utilize object detection confidence valuesto weight individual object influence. Even better results are found ifthe size and location of the object are taken into account.

When objects are human faces, the size is typically the intraoculardistance, or the area of each face. FIG. 4 shows a sample mapping f( ),from object area normalized by total asset area, to a metric calledsize.

$\begin{matrix}{{size} = {f\left( \frac{objectArea}{assetArea} \right)}} & (5)\end{matrix}$

In the mapping in FIG. 4, all objects >25% of the asset area are ofmaximum and equal importance, and as objects take up less space in theasset, they become less important.

For the location, a measure called centrality is utilized, wherecentrality is a Gaussian fit to the 2D Gaussian formula:

$\begin{matrix}{{{centrality}\left( {x,y} \right)} = {\frac{1}{2{\pi\sigma}_{x}\sigma_{y}}^{- \frac{\lbrack{\frac{\Delta_{x}^{2}}{\sigma_{x}^{2}} + \frac{\Delta_{y}^{2}}{\sigma_{y}^{2}}}\rbrack}{2}}}} & (6)\end{matrix}$

Where:

σ_(x)=2×imageWidth/3

σ_(y)=2×imageHeight/3

Δ_(x)=abs(objectCentroidX−imageWidth/2)

Δ_(y)=abs(objectCentroidY−3×imageHeight/5)

image Width is the width of the image in pixels

imageHeight is the height of the image in pixels

objectCentroidX is the centroid column of the object bounding box

objectCentroidY is the centroid row of the object bounding box

FIG. 5 shows a sample centrality importance map, where the hotterregions are the more important regions and the cooler regions are lessimportant. This importance map can be any 2D function, and often, amiddle region of the image can have equal emphasis. It should be readilyobvious how to expand this function to be any mask or function,including a weighted sum of Gaussian functions.

To combine size and centrality, a measure called objectImpact isdeveloped, which requires that objects need to be both large andoptimally located to have a high weight. In general, optimally locatedis often a variant of centrally located, but can be any map of the sortshown in FIG. 5. ObjectImpact is defined as:

objectImpact=αsize×βcentrality  (7)

The values of α and β are scalars that assign more or less importance tothe object size and object location. By default, α=β=1. However, if itis determined that size is more important, then α>β. Eq. (7) can beextended to include any number of parameters, each with unique scalarweights.

Using the notion of objectImpact, it is possible to calculate an impactscore for the overall asset for each facial feature. If there are Xobjects detected in an asset, each of these objects has an objectfeature 216, 226, and we can combine these into a single object feature220 using the objectImpact for each object feature:

objectFeatureImpact=(Σ_(i=1)^(x)objectImpact_(i)objectFeature_(i))/X  (8)

Similarly, other useful object features 220 can be created from theindividual object features 216, 226, where each is weighted by itscorresponding objectImpact score. For example, the minimum and maximumfeatures weighted by impact score are calculated as:

MinObjectFeatureImpact=min_(i)objectImpact_(i)objectFeature_(i) , i=1 .. . X  (9)

MaxObjectFeatureImpact=max_(i)objecImpact_(i)objectFeature_(i) , i=1 . .. X  (10)

Where X is the number of detected objects, objectImpact, is the weightor importance assigned to each object, and objectFeature_(i) is thecalculated feature for each object. For example, if objects are faces,each face in an asset has an eye blink feature. Rather than averagingthe eye blink features of all detected faces to report the overall asseteye blink feature, each eye blink is weighted. For example, if eye blinkis weighted by faceImpact, an eyeBlinkImpact feature is formulated. Theasset eye blink feature is then a function of these individualeyeBlinkImpact features, the two most important features for eye blinkbeing the mean and minimum of all eyeBlinkImpact features. In thisfashion eye blink from small faces on the edge of the picture are not asimportant as eye blink on larger faces in the center of an image.

The object impact objectImpact_(i) for a given object may be computed inpart based upon the intended, expected, or current viewers of the asset.For example, if the object is a face, and the identity of the face isknown using any of the variety of previously discussed facialrecognition techniques, then the faceImpact or object impact may beadjusted based upon the preferences of the intended or current viewers.For example, the mother of the bride viewing wedding photos may place agreater importance on the appearance of the bride than the groom, and agreater importance on the appearance of the groom than on the groom'sparents. If the intended or current audience contains multiple people,than the object impact may be computed as a function of the individualpreferences.

The relative importance of the subject to the viewer may be eitherstatically specified, or automatically determined. In the case where thepresentation of assets is done in a digital fashion, the importance maybe determined on the fly by using a built-in camera found on mostlaptops and tablets. As such, the importance will change automaticallyas a function of the viewer. The viewer can be determined viademographics (age, gender, race, etc.), or by identity.

The importance of a given object may also be determined at least in partby the frequency of the object within a collection of assets. Thecollection of assets may be the collection containing the assetcontaining the object being scored. Alternatively, the collection may bea secondary collection, such as the collection of images belonging to auser in a social media framework such as Facebook, or the collection ofimages belonging to user and their social network in such a framework.For example, people recognition using clustering may be used to groupfaces. A face belonging to a person that is well-represented in acollection may be given greater weight than a face belonging to a personthat is observed just once in a collection. For example, pictures from avacation will often feature family or friends who typically will appearin multiple pictures. However, strangers may appear in various picturesas part of the backdrop; such individuals are not likely to appear inmultiple pictures. Likewise, random strangers are not likely to appearin pictures belonging to the user or the user's social network in athird party social media framework. Consulting social media can helpprevent the error that might occur by simply considering the frequencyof an object within a single collection of assets, such as the set ofpictures taken during a trip. For example, a user may have captured asingle picture of a relative, but the relative should not be considereda stranger. By consulting the pictures, and/or the reportedrelationships, found in a framework such as Facebook. the [system] canavoid the error of concluding a given person is a stranger and thereforeunimportant when in fact they are not. Once objects are determined to beunimportant, the objectImpact_(i) of such objects may be discounted;alternatively, the presence of such objects may be counted negatively.

Using methods previously described, the brightness, contrast,colorfulness, sharpness, and noise can be calculated independently foreach object, as well as for the entire asset. Some features such asbrightness calculate well over the entire asset. Other features, such asnoise, are especially problematic to calculate over the entire asset. Assuch, referring back to FIG. 2, the object features 220 are used to aidthe asset feature detector 240. For example, noiseImpact as calculatedfrom all faces in the asset is fed into the noise feature detector, andperhaps weighted quite high. Similarly, brightnessImpact as calculatedfrom all faces in the asset is fed into the brightness feature detector,and weighted lower. Similar to the way impact scores weight individualobjects in an image, object detection confidence scores can used incombination.

FIG. 3A shows the relationship between X objects in an asset. It shouldbe readily evident objects can be faces, people, main subjects, or otherobjects as previously described. Two or more different object types in asingle asset can be combined as a single object feature 220 as:

MergeObjectFeature=Σ_(i=1) ^(q)θ_(i)ObjectFeatureImpact_(i)  (11)

Where q is the number of object types, θ_(i) is the weight or importanceassigned to each object type, and ObjectFeatureImpact_(i) is theindividual weighted object feature for each object type. For example, asingle asset may have 5 faces, one dog, and a single main subject. Eachobject type has their own impact scores used to create an object featurefor faces, dogs, and main subject. These three object types are thencombined via a weighted summation to create the object features andeventually quality parameters 305. In a preferred embodiment, theseweights favor faces as the most important, followed by pets, mainsubjects, people, then other objects. However, if the purpose was toextract company logos as the object of importance, this can be weightedhigher.

FIG. 3B combines multiple assets from a single event into an overallevent set of features and parameters. In particular, each asset y hasits own features and parameters, γ∈1 . . . Y, with Y assets in theevent. This has two purposes, 1) this allows the renormalization of allassets in an event to an overall canonical average; and 2) provides ameasure of quality of a particular set of assets for an event. Theformer is useful, so that, for instance, if all images at a particularvacation event were dark, or unsharp, they would be shifted higherbefore comparison with assets from other events. If they were notshifted higher, they would never be selected for an enhancedphotographic product where only a top percentage of assets get selected.If this were an important vacation event, a user would probably wantsome of these images to be selected for the enhanced photographicproduct, even if the overall quality parameters were lower than average.This renormalization increases the probability of selection of someassets from this event. The latter purpose is helpful if there areseveral sources of assets from the same event. For example, at thevacation event, assets may come from a camera, and two smartphones. Itcertainly would intrigue a user if the overall quality from each devicecould automatically be determined, and be beneficial to choose assetsfrom higher quality capture devices. At the same time, nointalizingacross the different capture devices can help ensure that assets are notchosen from higher quality capture devices at the exclusion of lowercapture devices, if that is not the consumer's intent. For example, ahusband and wife vacationing together may travel with different capturedevices, one using a smart phone, and the other using a digital SLRcamera. Without some sort of normalization, the pictures from the DSLRmay be chosen at the expense of the smart phone, resulting in certainsubjects or scenes not getting selected at all. In one preferredembodiment, bias is given towards assets captured by the higher qualitycapture devices only when comparable assets (matching scene or object)are also available from other lower-quality capture devices.

A social network is a social structure made of individuals (or groups ofindividuals) called “nodes,” which are linked by one or more specifictypes of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship or relationshipsof beliefs, knowledge or prestige. In some cases, it can be convenientto use a graphical representation to illustrate the social relationshipsbetween people (or groups of people) in a social network. In suchgraphical representations, people are typically represented by vertices,and social relationships are rept esented by connections between thevertices. Two people in a social network are said to be “linked” ifthere is a connection between the vertices representing the people.

A number of interne sites have recently become popular for providing away for members of a social network to communicate and share informationwith each other. These internet sites are sometimes referred to asonline social networks. Using these social links and online socialnetworks, assets are shared amongst many users. Instead of only havingassets from a family camera and family smartphones, now when compilingan enhanced photographic product, assets can be solicited from thisbroad net of online social connections. Moreover, both frequency andtype of interactions as well as self-reported relationships in an onlinesocial network may be used to provide a measure of the relativeimportance of one person to another. In addition, social networkstypically provide a mechanism to associate identity with facial regions;this infoi Illation may be used as exemplars to enable a facialdetection algorithm perform people recognition.

While FIG. 3B, extends the notion of asset feature and qualityparameters across an event, FIG. 3C extends the notion of feature andquality parameters across a user collection. As such, we can bothnormalize scores across collections, and/or provide measures or qualityfrom one collection to another. A collection can be from a single user,or span the user's online social links. One collection may be from scansof film, another from an older digital camera, another from a newcamera, another from a smartphone, another from a photographic socialsharing site, another from a social networking site, another from asibling's secure disk card, and another may be from a cousin's privateonline disk storage service.

Once again, if a year in summary review were being done, we cannormalize each event, or each collection of events, to ensure bothselection of best assets, as well as inclusion of assets from a varietyof collections.

This normalization of scores can be done both at the asset collectionlevel as well as on the individual level. Using facial recognitiontechniques, all faces of “Aunt Suzie” can be normalized such that hermean scores and distribution of scores match a population average. Forexample, Aunt Suzie may never smile, and therefore if an asset is foundwhere Aunt Suzie is almost happy, this should get scored very high forexpression or smile rating. On the contrary, “Cousin Bob” may always besmiling, therefore to score high for expression or smile, Cousin Bobmust be expressing an exceptionally brilliant smile. Similarly, ifCousin Bob typically squints with one eye, then the eye blink value maybe discounted or even ignored for his faces. In one preferredembodiment, a parameter profile is stored for each known person, wherethe profile provides weighting scores appropriate for that individual.The profile is determined by analyzing known faces for a given person.Social media frameworks may be used as a source of known faces.Auxiliary data such as comments and the number of likes associated withface-containing images may be used to further refine the weightingscores. The profile may be further updated over time, as new assetscontaining the specified person are added to the system, with thecharacteristics of more recent assets potentially have a greater weightthan older assets. By weighting more recent content more highly, theprofile will adapt to how the individual's appearance changes over time.

Normalization of scores may change and be adoptable by age, gender,race, culture, or other population segment. For example, the mean smileof all males may be lower than the mean smile of all females, thereforethe smile distribution score of males is adjusted to match that offemales. Since the detection of age, gender, race, etc. can be donewithout user interaction, this correction can not only be learnedautomatically over large collections, but it can continually be learnedover time, and more importantly, adjustments can be applied on the flywithout any user interaction or be custom to a specific collection ofassets.

Quality parameters 280 determined according to the method of the presentinvention can be useful in the process of suggesting possible uses forimages having high quality and selecting specific media assets for usetypes such as printing, sharing, displaying. Assets can also be used toproduce specialty photographic products. Specialty photographic productsinclude mugs, calendars, mouse pads, greeting cards, ornaments,photobooks, and digital slide shows.

Sample uses of the quality parameters 280 include, but are not limitedto:

1) Retrieval of one or more assets from a larger collection or networkedcollection of assets, based upon the quality parameters 280. Forexample, a search engine may ask for colorful images, containing twopeople, with low contrast, good sharpness, captured in the year 2013,and one of the people should have the identity of “Aunt Suzie”.

2) Culling a large collection or networked collection of assets suchthat the top n assets are selected for a specialty photographic product.For example, a photographer may take a few hundred photos at a wedding,and have access to dozens more taken by patrons of the wedding, but onlyhave room for 150 of them in a photobook. To aid the photographer indoing an initial layout of the photobook, the top scoring 150 images areautomatically inserted into the photobook.

3) Determining which of m duplicate images are the best. When takingpictures of one or more people, photographers often take one picture,then request the subjects to pose for a second, third, or more photo.The idea is that hopefully one of the images comes out good, with allsubjects paying attention, eyes open, and having a pleasing expression.Given m duplicate images, the best image can automatically be retrieved.

4) When laying out multiple assets on a single view or page of specialphotographic product, it is often desirable to make some assets larger,while others smaller. The overall quality parameter 280 is used as apredictor of how much real-estate each asset should take up on thesingle view.

5) When laying out multiple assets on a single view or page, or on twofacing pages, it is often desirable to choose assets that are mutuallyagreeable with one another. For example, it might be a good idea tochoose assets that have similar subject matter, similar color, or othersimilar asset features. Similar in this case can mean of the same, orcan just mean pleasing, whereby pleasing sometimes means opposite suchas blue and yellow looking good together. By placing individual featuresof each object in a vector, and computing a L2 norm, assets are similarwith have similar color, sharpness, noise, etc. Additionally, whenlaying out images with faces onto two facing pages, the eye gazes andposes of the faces can be selected so that the two facing pages willlook pleasing to the consumers. For example, the pose and gaze of a faceon one page can be selected to be opposing to the one on the facing pagewith both facing toward the middle of the two pages. When there aremultiple people or subjects in an image, it may be desirable to selectthe best subjects for later reuse, or if image retargeting will beperformed (auto zoom and crop), it would be helpful to know which arethe more and less important subjects in the image.

6) When printing or displaying assets, it is often desirable to changethe aspect ratio of the asset to match an output aspect ratio or toproduce a more attractive layout. In such cases, the image asset mayneed to be cropped. The cropping may be performed in such a way so as tominimize the change in the quality parameters, or to maximize thequality parameters of the resulting cropped asset.

7) When printing or displaying pictures of a given person, it may bethat none of the candidate pictures of a person are completelysatisfactory. Knowledge of desirable feature values specific to thatgiven individual may be used to manipulate the appearance of a person ina given image to more closely match a more desirable appearance. Forexample, exemplar data from a social media framework such as Facebookmay be analyzed to determine the feature values most commonly associatedwith acceptable pictures of a given person. The appearance of a personin a given image may then be subtly manipulated to improve its featurevalues.

8) When selecting pictures of a given person for a particular product,the context of the product may be important for determining how toweight the various quality parameters associated with a given object.For example, the importance of some quality features in a photo album ofa camping trip will be different than the importance of those samefeatures in a photo album of a wedding. Hair neatness, clothingappearance or even eye squinting may be of little importance in acamping album while in a wedding these features may be discriminatingfactors. As another example, a person with wind-blown hair may lookacceptable in an outdoor picture, but look less acceptable in an indoorpicture. By incorporating the scene type as one of the qualityparameters, the quality parameters may be more appropriately combinedand compared. Factors such as but not limited to scene, season, and timeof day may be used to change the weighting of the quality parameters. inaddition, given sufficient exemplar data, an embodiment may be able togenerate different profiles for a given person for differentenvironments, such as different scenes or time-of-day.

Note that the method of computing the quality parameters, including thedetermination of any associated weighting values, may depend upon theintended application.

Given a large collection of assets, special bias or attention should begiven to rare occurrences. For example, if a collection of assets isdetermined to be from a few large events, and a few small events, theassets from the small event should be preferentially scored higher toensure they get selected into a specialty photographic product.Similarly if an event has many assets, they should be scored lower sothey do not dominate the specialty photographic product.

With regards to improving the quality of facial renditions in an image,standard techniques include blemish removal and morphological blendingof faces with an ideal face. With facial quality parameters in hand,more aggressive image enhancement is automatically applied to lowerscoring images. For example, when performing blemish/red-eye/wrinklereduction or facial beautification, faces with high quality parametersare given minor changes, while faces scoring lower get more and morecorrection.

The methods described not only aid the creation of digital enhancedphoto products, but can also aid in the initial capture process. Forexample, a Facial based quality parameter can be used as a cameracapture control. A camera directed at a subject will capture an imagewhen the Quality parameter is maximized. Similarly, the frame in a videosegment with maximum quality parameter is automatically tagged, or thequality parameter for each from can be saved for later usage.

In another embodiment of the current invention, the camera assigns arating for facial image quality continuously. As such, the subject couldadjust their expression to enhance their score. Audio/visual cues toenhance quality parameter score such as audio feedback suggesting “smilemore”, “open your eyes wider”, “turn your face slightly to the left”,etc will not only generate higher quality originals, but train subjectshow to be better subjects for picture taking in general. This could alsobe used to extract clips and stills from live or recorded video streams.Further, the user could set a numeric threshold so that only images thatmet or exceeded the threshold would be automatically selected.

It will be understood that, although specific embodiments of theinvention have been described herein for purposes of illustration andexplained in detail with particular reference to certain preferredembodiments thereof, numerous modifications and all sorts of variationsmay be made and can be effected within the spirit of the invention andwithout departing from the scope of the invention.

1. A method for determining an impact score for a digital image,comprising: providing the digital image wherein the digital imageincludes one or more faces; using a processor to determine at least oneimage feature for each of the one or more faces; using the processor tocompute an object impact score for each of the one or more faces,wherein the object impact score is based at least upon one of thedetermined image features; weighting the object impact score for each ofthe one or more faces based on at least one of the determined imagefeatures for the face; using the processor to compute an impact scorefor the digital image by combining the weighted object impact scores forthe one or more faces in the image; providing a parameter profile forthe one or more faces, the parameter profile including weighting scoresfor a plurality of features for the one or more faces; modifying thecomputed impact store using at least one of the parameter profiles; andstoring the modified computed impact score in a processor accessiblememory.
 2. The method of claim 1, further including: using the processorto determine a size and a location for each of the one or more faces;and weighting the object impact score for each of the one or more facesbased on the location and the size of the face in the image.
 3. Themethod of claim 1, wherein the image features include size, location,brightness, contrast, eye blink, facial expression, sharpness, noise,and colorfulness.
 4. A method for determining quality parameters of amedia asset comprising: using an object detector to detect and provide aplurality of objects from the media asset; using an object featuredetector to detect and provide a plurality of object features from theplurality of objects; using an asset feature detector to provide aplurality of asset features from the media asset and the pluralityobject features; using a capture information extractor to provide aplurality of capture features from the media asset; using a socialinformation extractor to provide a plurality of social features from themedia asset, the social features being determined at least in part uponthe similarity of the media asset to other media assets in communicationwith the social information extractor; and using a quality computer toprovide a plurality of quality parameters from the plurality of objectfeatures, the plurality of asset features, the plurality of capturefeatures, and the plurality of social features.
 5. The method of claim 4wherein the object detector is configured to detect human faces.
 6. Themethod of claim 4 wherein the plurality of object features comprises aplurality of facial features.
 7. The method of claim 4 wherein theplurality of object features comprises size and location of the face;the pitch, roll, and yaw of the face: the contrast, brightness, colorbalance, and noise of the face: the gender, race, hair style andneatness of appearance, and identity of the face; the facial expression,eye blink, eye gaze, red eye, mouth open, teeth detection, tonguedetection, glasses detection, hat detection, or occlusion detection ofthe face.
 8. The method of claim 4 wherein the plurality of objectfeatures comprises clothing, including the color of the clothing, thestyle of the clothing, or the condition of the clothing.
 9. The methodof claim 4 wherein the plurality of object features comprisesenvironmental features.
 10. The method of claim 4 wherein the objectdetector is configured to detect human bodies or torsos, animals,bacterium, viruses, internal organs, cars, or assembly line parts. 11.The method of claim 4 wherein the asset detector is configured to detectbrightness, colorfulness, hues, color distribution, sharpness, noise,and contrast.
 12. The method of claim 4 wherein the capture informationextractor is configured to extract date and time that the media assetwas captured, focal length, subject distance, magnification, presence ofa flash, presence of a self-timer, GPS coordinates, and imageresolution.
 13. The method of claim 4 wherein the social informationextractor is further configured to extract number of likes of the mediaasset, comments, tags, viewings, downloads, links to other photocollections, upload date, whether or not the media asset was used as aprofile picture, or statistics on owners of the comments.
 14. The methodof claim 4 wherein the quality computer sums up equally valued orweighted inputs to provide the plurality of quality parameters.
 15. Themethod of claim 11 wherein the brightness, contrast, colorfulness,sharpness, or noise is determined independently for each of theplurality of objects.